


there was a reason (i collided into you)

by Mx_Carter



Category: Star Trek: Alternate Original Series (Movies)
Genre: Character Study, Feelings, Fluff, Lord so many feelings, M/M, Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-30
Updated: 2016-07-30
Packaged: 2018-07-27 15:00:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,332
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7623265
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mx_Carter/pseuds/Mx_Carter
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Somewhere along the way, when Hikaru wasn’t looking, Ben slid into his life and expanded it to include <i>his</i> life, and it <i>works</i>. </p><p>Or; in which Hikaru and Ben fall in love. Plants are involved.</p>
            </blockquote>





	there was a reason (i collided into you)

Hikaru meets Ben at the San Francisco Botanical Gardens, something which all his friends will tease him about for years to come. Which is why he doesn’t tell them that they met when Hikaru was almost pitched butt-first into a rhododendron by a rude tourist, and Ben caught him. Around the waist. Like they were waltzing and Hikaru has just been dipped.

He’s taken pains to make sure Ben knows that none of his friends can, under any circumstances, learn about this. If they do, he’ll probably have to kill someone, and then he’d have to ask Uhura to help him hide the body, which would be very unfair on her.

Anyway, so they meet at the Botanical Gardens, and end up going for coffee when they realise they share a deep love for plants. Ben is currently studying for his PhD in Xenobotany after having already gained one in plain old Terran Botany – he comes to the Gardens, he tells Hikaru, when the workload is killing him, to remind himself why he loves the subject so much. They end up talking about how they became interested in botany – when Ben starts to wax lyrical about what draws him to the subject, the beauty and versatility and sheer _variety_ of plant life, the neat simplicity of translocation and stomata, the incredible ingenuity of the chemicals they create and adaptions they employ…well.

Hikaru’s been into space plenty of times, a side effect of having a mother in Starfleet and a fair portion of his relatives off planet, so when he says that Ben’s face lights up like thousands of stars, he knows what he’s talking about.

He gives Ben his number on instinct, knowing in some quiet and inescapable way that he needs to see more of this man like he needs to fly, to see the stars, to breathe. Even in his head it sounds stupid, but it really is that sudden and that simple. Ben texts him the next day, complaining about the horrible lab he’s just suffered through, and asking him out for drinks “So I can drown my sorrows. You too, Starfleet boy, I’m sure you have plenty of sorrow to drown, given how much work they seem to give you lot.”

“Well, how will they know we’re the galaxy’s best and brightest if they don’t constantly overload us with information and test us twice a day?” Hikaru points out, and the laugh he gets in response does something funny to his stomach.

He’s fairly sure it’s meant to be a date – there’d definitely been a fair amount of attraction, and they had met in a truly rom-com-esque way. So he dresses nicely, and when Ben flirts with him he flirts back, delighted. It’s warm and slow-paced, and incredibly nice.

They kiss on that date – years into the future, they will be arguing about whether it was their first or second – and it shifts something in Hikaru that no kiss has ever done before. It’s tender, sweet and soft and Hikaru wants to take that moment and freeze it under glass, preserve it forever.

When he gets back to their room, Pavel takes one look at him and bursts out laughing.

One date turns into four, into five, into things that aren’t dates but simply spending time together, and while they never officially move in together Hikaru spends so many nights at Ben’s that they’re basically cohabiting. Living with someone else has always felt slightly uncomfortable for him, but somehow it works with Ben. They have little jokey fights over mugs and coasters, making the bed and who gets which side of the bed – the latter normally ends with them sleeping on top of each other, dead centre.

Somewhere along the way, when Hikaru wasn’t looking, Ben slid into his life and expanded it to include _his_ life, and it _works_. They just…click.

It’s like nothing Hikaru has ever felt before. He’s dated, enough to be sure he likes men far more than he does women, enough to know his type, but the relationships have always been…transitory. Hikaru has always know that he’s only visiting Earth, really, that one way or another he’s going to end up somewhere in the black, and everything else feels like he’s just passing the time, whiling away the days until he can get where he really belongs. That’s always surprised most people, and he’s never quite sure why. Maybe because he comes off as very steady, very self-possessed, with none of the vibrating, over-spilling energy that he will see in Jim Kirk, a couple of years down the line. Hikaru has never had a problem keeping his restlessness inside, channelling it into fencing and physics and biology and flying anything he can get his hands on. Flying demands patience and a cool head, as does fencing and academia and anything else worth doing, so those had been good teachers for him.

Despite the ease with which he tucks it away, the drive to _go_ always begins to show after a while. Most of the men he’s dated had seen it early on – smart is definitely his type – and they all tried to…hold him down, he supposes. In different ways, some more subtle than others, but all the same.

Ben doesn’t do that. Ben, with his nails perpetually dirt-rimmed and his brain filled with facts about soil consistency and mineral concentrations, doesn’t even attempt to ground him. He never goes quiet and passive-aggressive when Hikaru talks about his piloting or his studies, never brings up the length of an average tour or tries to get him interested in potential jobs on Earth. Hell, he straight-up tells Hikaru he’s fine with it, even jokes about being the mistress in the dorky, relaxed way that means he’s not worried. They end up having a serious sit-down talk about it when they both notice that Hikaru has been moving in, and after a few minutes of back-and-forth Ben points out that he’s perfectly fine with long-distance, perfectly fine with shore leave and vid calls.

“I love you,” he’d said as they sat side by side on Ben’s crappy couch, “and I love you enough that I’m not going to try and change you, or let a little thing like distance get between me and the best person I’ve ever met in my life. You’re worth the wait.”

Hikaru hadn’t been able to speak through the sudden lump in his throat, but he’d laid his head on Ben’s shoulder, and Ben had rested his head on top of Hikaru’s, and they had sat and breathed together until the lump went down and he could push his wonderful boyfriend down on the crappy couch and kiss him _everywhere._

Despite the Conversation, and the ones after it, despite the many reassurances and confirmations that this is okay, they are okay, Hikaru wakes up about five months before he’s due to graduate, looks down at Ben curled into the pillows beside him and realises, quite suddenly, that he _does not want to go_.

When he tells his _kaasan_ this over a video link, trying very hard not to panic, she smiles very softly and tells him that she’s pleased for him. She doesn’t tell him she understands, because he doesn’t need her to – he already knows that she’d felt the same way about his _tousan._

Hikaru has always taken after his _kaasan_ , in looks and in personality. She’s the reason he enrolled in Starfleet, the reason he never tried to squash down the restlessness – she has it to, and she helped him understand it, normalise it. She and his _tousan_  taught him that he wasn’t being flighty or ungrateful, and he loves them dearly for it.

Sulu Fuyuko has told him many times that her husband was the first reason she ever found to stay on Earth. As a child he had thought it was beautiful, like his own personal fairy tale. He had also been adamant that nothing and no one could ever do that for him.

For about five minutes that morning, he hates Ben for proving him wrong. Then Ben wakes up, gives him a lazy eyes-closed smile and reaches an arm up to him, flopping it on his shoulder. Hikaru takes the hint and slides back down, wrapping his arms around his boyfriend and letting his lips come to rest on Ben’s cheek. Letting Ben anchor him, if only for a little while.

Maybe the reason it doesn’t hurt him is because it’s a choice. Hikaru choses to come back to Ben, to let Ben hold him, to hold him back. To fit himself into the corners of Ben’s existence and expand them until he has room, to allow Ben to do the same to him. He has watched as their lives mingle, as they attach themselves to each other in way after different way, and chosen to let it happen.

Hikaru will leave for the stars, because true love doesn’t actually change everything, even though he’s completely certain that this _is_ true love. But now he’s calmly content in the fact that Ben will still be there when he gets back.

And he will come back, he knows this now. Strange and new and terrifying as it is may be, he is as certain as a tree is of the end of winter that he will always find his way back to Ben.

~~~

They marry a few months after Vulcan’s destruction, because Hikaru proposes four days after they get home. Hikaru proposes four days after they get home because, somewhere in the time it took for someone to come and tow them back to Earth, he had looked out at the stars and realised, sudden and firm, that life is way too goddamn short, and also that he wants to marry Ben.

It takes a day for him to have more than a moment to himself through the bustle of debriefs and press conferences and medical check-ups, and another day where he cannot physically bear to leave Ben’s side for long enough to buy the ring. On the third day he marshals himself enough to call Pavel and Uhura – he and Pavel had befriended Uhura at the academy, both of them know Ben well and he trusts their judgement – to go ring shopping with him. Inviting Uhura has the side effect of inviting Spock, who is perfectly composed in a way that makes Hikaru suspect he’s twenty seconds and a stiff breeze from collapse. Hikaru doesn’t know Spock all that well, but he can’t bring himself to turn the man away, not when he so obviously needs to be next to Uhura.

It ends up being fun, really fun, to wander through jewellery shops, gossiping and bantering and nit-picking each of the rings. Over the past few days Hikaru has felt like something fundamental had shifted in the world, and that nothing could ever be remotely the same again. To find out that he can still laugh and joke, that even Spock, who has lost so much, can make arch comments on band thickness and box quality that are unexpectedly hilarious – he supposes that the man does have one hell of a deadpan – reassures him that at least some things are the same. That, even though he feels irrevocably changed, the world is still mostly the same place, and he can still live in it.

The third day is the day he finally convinces himself that he’s going to be okay.

Eventually, Uhura finds him a ring so perfect, Hikaru almost tears up just looking at it. It’s a simple gold band, slightly thicker than is fashionable, but the green diamond set into it has been cut into a tiny, perfect leaf, resting on the top like it had just fallen onto the surface of a pond. It’s expensive, but when he told his parents about his plans they informed him that they would pay the cost of the ring, with such identically terrifying looks on their faces that he hadn’t even tried to argue.

While they shop, they help him come up with a plan.

On the fourth day, Hikaru takes Ben to the Botanical Gardens, and they walk the pathways hand in hand. Ben, who loves succulents in the way that most people love kittens and puppies, drags a smiling Hikaru to the Succulent Garden and coos over the beds where Terran and Caitian656 varieties sit side by side. Vulcan succulents require a different soil type and a much lower humidity, so they’re kept in a greenhouse nearby. Said greenhouse is currently walled off – probably making completely sure that the plants are healthy and can withstand transport, Ben tells him in a soft, careful voice. Both of them are silent as they skirt the greenhouse – there’s something about it, the fact that within those walls are plants taken from a planet that doesn’t exist anymore, that makes the air feel heavy.

Finally, they arrive at the Rhododendron Garden, and Hikaru feels a calm descend over him as they walk the familiar pathways hand in hand. It’s not like the calm he felt at the helm of the Enterprise, when he honestly wasn’t sure whether or not he was going to live or die, just that he needed to not think about it right then in order to focus and do his damn job. It’s soft instead of sharp, warm instead of icy.

Contentment, he thinks. Peace.

He stops them in front of the bush he’d so nearly crashed into, two years ago, and turns to face Ben, who looks at him quizzically. Then, smart man that he is, his eyes fix on the purple-blue flowers of the rhododendron, highlighted against the pink and white bushes surrounding it, and then widen in something like shock and something like awe.

As the love of his life turns back towards him, face alight like thousands of stars, Hikaru Sulu goes to one knee.

**Author's Note:**

> It was meant to be 200 words, guys. I sincerely don't know what happened.
> 
> Although it should hopefully be obvious, kaasan and tousan are more casual words for motherand father respectively. Or at least, I hope they are. If I'm wrong, please let me know and I will be deeply in your debt.


End file.
